This blog comments on business, education, philosophy, psychology, and economics, among other topics, based on my understanding of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Ludwig von Mises’ economics, and Edith Packer's psychology. Epistemology and psychology are my special interests. Note that I assume ethical egoism and laissez-faire capitalism are morally and economically unassailable. My interest is in applying, not defending, them.
Independent judgment is both a personality trait, a distinctive way of thinking and acting, and a character trait, a moral conviction in the face of opposition or indifference to stand by one’s beliefs and values. A number of writers in their own nuanced ways have captured the gist of these traits.
The late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, offers in his Stanford Commencement Address of 2005 (1, 2) an eloquent statement of independence:
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Follow your own thoughts and emotions, Jobs is saying. Don’t give in to the edicts and requests of others.
Psychiatrist William Glasser in Positive Addiction (p. 3) ties independence to happiness:
As we grow, we should learn to judge for ourselves what is worthwhile, but it takes a great deal of strength to do what is right when few people will agree with us for doing it. Most of us spend our lives in a series of compromises between doing what we believe in and doing what will please those who are important to us. Happiness depends a great deal on gaining enough strength to live with a minimum of these compromises.
It is these compromises to please others, Glasser says, that create unhappy relationships and lead us to seek compensating behaviors, such as anxiety and depression, or worse. Strength to say “yes” to ourselves and “no” to possibly too-demanding and probing others is the path to happiness.
Dependence, not independence, is the quality most suitable to authoritarian states. . . . The hallmark of the independent man is the ability to bear responsibility. To be responsible and accountable for one’s actions. To do, and to stand up for what one has done. Not to hide behind “superior orders,” not to seek shelter in group decisions, and to take strength from some heroic figure—but to be one’s own man.
The self-reliant and self-responsible individual, Greenberg is saying, does not unquestioningly take orders from authority. The citizen of a free society exhibits a healthy distrust of anyone in power.
Ayn Rand, by way of Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (p. 1019), places the source of independent judgment in one’s own mind:
Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life . . .
No one, in other words, can get inside our heads to make us do our own thinking or, for that matter, make us not think. Perception, judgment, decision making, and action all originate within our minds. Control of our lives, then, is internal. Letting others “pinch hit” for us is to allow them to do our thinking.
What encourages us to become independent? How can our children develop it? Perhaps Summerhill School founder, A. S. Neill, states the conditions best (Summerhill, p. 9):
Free children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon. Indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child.
By “free child,” Neill means one whose rights as an individual are respected by other children and adults in both home and school, and one who respects the rights of other children and adults in both home and school. Otherwise, the child is free to do whatever he or she desires, that is, is free of authoritarian edicts and bossing and bullying by others. Not surprisingly, Neill also ties independence to the free society as an essential requirement.
Independence and happiness require freedom because freedom produces independence. And independence makes happiness possible.
In education there exists a continuum of how much control is exerted over students or, to put it another way, how much choice is given to them. The scale ranges from the total control and minimal choice of state-run traditional education to the considerable freedom to choose given to students of such alternative schools as Summerhill and Sudbury Valley. With their cleverly designed didactic materials and the choice of which materials to work on, Montessori schools probably fall somewhere in between.
Teachers in all schools vary according to how much control they will exert in the implementation of their school’s ideology and how much choice they will give the students. So even an American public school classroom can enjoy freedom of choice and a Montessori classroom can be tightly controlled. The question is, how much control and choice should there be in education?
One answer for the public school is given by psychiatrist William Glasser:
We are pushing for drug-free schools. We need to push even harder for coercion-free and failure-free quality schools because it is the alienation caused by coercion and punishment that leads young people to turn seriously to drugs (Choice Theory, p. 255).
“Quality school” is Glasser’s term for a B or above mastery learning, failure-free environment for all students. Replacing coercive external control psychology (1, 2), says Glasser, with kind and attentive teacher-student relationships will enable students to develop success identities. Glasser’s approach includes getting rid of the rewards-and-punishment system of grading and punitive detention and principal’s office “solutions” to disruption. Students will then become motivated through the friendly relationships with their teachers to achieve educational goals.
Glasser demonstrates in detail how his coercion-free, failure-free approach to schooling was accomplished with so-called learning disabled students in a Cincinnati middle school (Choice Theory, pp. 259-69; also described here). Smothered with kindness and attention, one hundred forty-eight overaged, “left behind,” probably destined-for-jail middle school students transformed themselves and learned what was required to move on to high school. Removing structural control over the students, adjusting to their pace of learning, and giving them choice in their education led to this success. Removing coercion removed failure.
The ultimate in coercion-free, failure-free schooling is that of Summerhill and Sudbury Valley, where nearly everything is optional—especially courses and class attendance—and the students are given wide control of the schools through the democratic process. The question remains, though, how much control and choice should be left to the students.* This question cannot be answered without understanding that the main structural control in education today is the state’s monopoly over schooling, achieved through compulsory attendance laws, expropriation of funds to pay for the system, and curricular and methodological dictates through the state’s regulatory power. The framework of education is that control and choice are denied to both parents and students.
In the absence of state involvement, that is, in a free market in education, the issue of control and choice becomes a little less clear. If by “control” one means a prescribed curriculum that all students must study, and the parents agree to send their children to such a school, then it is the parents’ legal right to do so. Psychologically, however, one can still argue that greater control and choice be given to the child. Adjusting to pace of learning and catering to interests are two of the most important methodological requirements of a good school. Responding to students as human beings by building Glasserian friendships helps them acquire the confidence to flourish.
Traditional public education denies the legitimacy of control and choice in the classroom and through its coercive bureaucratic framework makes both impossible to maintain for any length of time. It is this context of coercion that makes the likes of Summerhill and Sudbury Valley appealing and probably has contributed to their success. (Indeed, in 1969 or so, when I read the first Summerhill book, I longed to be a student there. I would have thrived.)
As parenting requires guiding in the process of becoming a mature adult, formal education also probably requires at least some guiding in the acquisition of knowledge, values, and skills to achieve independence. Learning to think conceptually, for example, is not automatic and may require direction from an adult. But does this learning have to take place on the adult’s schedule? In the Summerhill/Sudbury model the instructor waits until lessons are requested by the students. Guidance, yes, but not coercion. As responsible parents quickly discover, they cannot force anything into their child’s brain. Children must be won over by persuasion. So, too, with students in education.
*My question presupposes the principle of rights, namely that the students should not be given control or choice to harm others or their property.
The education literature since at least Rousseau has cautioned against viewing the child as a small adult. The meaning of the phrase, however, is not totally clear.
“Small adult” usually means that children are viewed as adults in miniature, that is, as small in height and weight and weak in physical strength, but otherwise as possessing an adult brain that is merely absent content. The job of educators and parents, then, is to fill that brain with knowledge to move the children, as they reach maturity, up to the level of educated adults.
The problem with this view is that the children obviously do not possess adult brains. And most parents and teachers have a sense that this is correct, namely that the brains of children are as immature as their bodies, that their cognitive capacities and abilities vary by age and among each other at the same age, and that pace of learning and interest determine what and how much any particular child will learn at any particular time. This is what the concept of “stages of development” is all about.
Yet adults continue to demand that children learn the way they, the adults, think they learned, by attempting to stuff the brains of children with knowledge the children are not ready for or interested in and by expecting this learning to take place and be completed at one time. I say “think they learned” because I doubt that many adults in fact learned the way the adults expect their children to learn.
The worst mistake adults make when relating to children is to demand obedience to authority. “Learn your multiplication tables or there will be a consequence.” “Pick up your clothes, or else . . .” Adults may or may not be consciously aware of acting on this premise, and sometimes it may be an act of desperation when nothing else works, but demanding obedience to authority is not nice when made either to children or to other adults. It is the demands of a dictator or authoritarian mentality; I’ll assume a more innocent motivation in adults for the rest of this discussion.
A widely common mistake that adults make in relating to children is what I call “one-time learning.” It manifests itself often in the (sometimes angry, sometimes exasperated) question, “What did I just tell you?” The question can be asked about anything, ranging from multiplication facts to dirty clothes on the floor to catching a softball with two hands. The assumption is that the child has been informed—the knowledge has been put into the brain; therefore, he or she should be able to instantly grasp, retain, and act on what was just “learned.”
Such expectation, however, is patently absurd. Adults do not as adults, and did not as children, learn that way. Experienced teachers know that two requirements of good teaching are repetition and patience, for the variety of reasons mentioned in the third paragraph above. Some children are just not ready to learn what the adults seem to think they should be learning right now. And others are just not interested in learning that great wisdom of the adults. What the experiments of Summerhill and Sudbury Valley Schools (1, 2, 3) have demonstrated is that children, when left free to pursue their own interests, will in fact learn to read, do arithmetic, and even go on to college, but not on the schedule that adult educators think they should be on.
This last was made obvious to me recently in my duties as assistant coach of my daughter’s softball team. One of the coach’s jobs is to repeatedly shout to the girls to use two hands when catching the ball, which they seldom do. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed, without my chiding, one girl (eight years old) all of a sudden was catching with two hands. Subsequently, in a game, she even made a semi-spectacular two-handed catch of a pop fly. Lesson learned, by the adult? Children march to their own drummer when it comes to learning! Something clicked in the girl’s mind that I could not have predicted. One-time learning certainly did not produce the result.
On the other side of the coin, adults who treat children as small adults often fail to grant them the cognitive capacities and abilities that they in fact do have. Montessori demonstrated this abundantly by teaching children to read at age four and by teaching lower elementary children geometry, algebra, and history, among other subjects that the education establishment long ago relegated to much later ages. Children desperately want to grow up and become adults, but adults have to allow them to do so, at their own pace and when they are interested enough to learn the ways of the adult.
The bottom line of the issue of viewing children as small adults is that children need to be viewed as children, not more than they are and not less than they are. And each child has to be viewed as a unique individual with unique desires and abilities. Recognizing and responding to those uniquenesses is one of the traits that separates teachers from those who would appear to be dictators.
Postscript. The recent financial bailout lunacy in the United States has sufficiently tweaked my boredom with politics to make this comment. The simplest, concise explanation and solution to the lunacy can be read here by Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute. For more detailed and equally competent comments, read many of the last month’s posts on the Mises blog, but especially this recent one by George Reisman (also posted here).
In chapter 4 of Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, I wrote: “Rules are commands to act or not act a certain way. Obedience may be rewarded; disobedience is certainly punished.” The context was the regulation of child and student behavior and my point was that “rules have no place in a theory of nurture.” Rules call for obedience to authority. Principles, on the other hand, teach abstract thought and lay the foundation for independence.
This is not to say that rules to protect young children from harm or to help them respect the rights of others are not ever a good idea. Young children, including those up to the age of adolescence, have not yet acquired the skill of abstract reasoning. Guidance from adults cannot always be made in the form of rational argument, nor is the young child likely to understand such reasoning. A screamed “Stop!” when a three-year-old is about to run into the street is appropriate, as is the command “Don’t step off the curb until I get there to take your hand.” The latter is a rule, but when the added explanation “Cars can do bad things to little children” is provided, the groundwork for reasoned thought is being laid. Repeated explanations on similar occasions lead to understanding and eventual grasp of the principle of observation and self-protection. Absence of the added explanation, or worse, punishment for something the young child cannot possibly know or understand sends only one message: “Obey.”
Elementary-aged children, roughly from six to twelve, pose an interesting challenge for adults. Logical thinking is noticeable in children of this age but it is concrete thinking, the “period of concrete operations,” as Piaget calls it. Broad abstractions, formed and retained over time, are difficult and rare. Yet elementary-aged children exhibit a highly active and rambunctious behavior that is often not to the liking of adults. The easiest solution is a barrage of rules, such as “Don’t run,” “No talking in class,” “No eating after 7PM,” etc. Such rules, to be effective, must be enforced with stern consequences, ranging from confinement to withdrawal of possessions or privileges to spanking; if the rules are not enforced, or meekly enforced, they will be ignored and children will run amok and have what some would say is a lowered respect for the adult. Lowered fear of the adult would be a more correct description.
Teaching principles means giving children a full explanation, for example, of why running is not advisable on the patio: they might stumble and hurt themselves or others, who have just as much right to be there as they do, and the running might interrupt or destroy the other children’s enjoyment. Such explanations require more words than a simple rule and there is no guarantee that the children will grasp and remember what was just said and implement a change of behavior to become the perfect angels that adults want them to become. Repetition of the explanation is required; so also is repetition required to enforce rules, unless the coercive consequences of breaking rules are so stern that the children get the message immediately. But then, what price has been paid in the psychological development of such coerced children?
Rules presuppose coercion. Principles presuppose teaching. A lot of it. But teaching principles requires patience, understanding, and, especially, fast thinking (of the right thing to say) that many adults—parents and teachers—do not have when trying to regulate and influence the behavior of elementary-aged children. Distractions and demands too often preclude the use of these three traits.
The middle ground between rules imposed from above and principles taught repeatedly (and exasperatingly) might be the democratic meeting in which children make and enforce their own rules. This is the solution adopted by the Summerhill School in England and Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. (See Go Fish!)
A variation of this advocated by Jane Nelsen, author of Positive Discipline and Positive Discipline in the Classroom, is the family and class meeting. The purpose of such meetings is to brainstorm for solutions to problems and agree on the solutions either by vote or consensus. To be effective, the adults must reduce themselves to equal participants, rather than act as lecturers or moralizers.
Having children take responsibility for their own behavior through discussion, brainstorming, and democratic voting or consensus frees adults from having to play cop and peacemaker and enables them to spend more time being the long-term thinkers and leaders that the children need. Until the perfect handbook is written and published on how to teach children to become perfect angels, this technique will probably have to do.
No, not the card game. I occasionally use this phrase—he or she needs to go fish—as metaphor for what some so-called problem children in elementary schools should be allowed to do.
My source for the phrase is Daniel Greenberg’s Sudbury Valley School (1, 2, 3), which is located on a ten-acre estate in Massachusetts. One of the essential features of the school is that the children, ages four to nineteen, are free to do whatever they want, including fish all day in the property’s pond, instead of attend classes. Indeed, classes are offered only at the request of students; education in the formal or traditional sense is entirely optional. The other essential feature is that large areas of the school’s social and operational behavior, including the hiring and firing of staff, are regulated by democratic vote.
Precursor to this type of school is the much older Summerhill in England (1, 2, 3), founded by A. S. Neill and now run by Neill’s daughter. At Summerhill, though, traditional classes are regularly scheduled, albeit optional, and somewhat more control, including the hiring and firing of staff, is maintained by the owner. Grades, exams, and standard diplomas are absent from both schools. Students who seek higher education are responsible for taking and passing high-school equivalency and college entrance exams.
Whatever one thinks of these two schools—and the opinion is not devoid of emotion—they have proven successful in educating students, or rather, as the proprietors are more likely to say, the students have educated themselves.
Sudbury Valley boasts that eighty percent of its graduates have gone on to college. It also has challenged several chestnuts of the educational establishment, such as the age at which children should learn to read and the length of time required to learn elementary-school arithmetic. Students at Sudbury have become competent readers as young as four and as old as eleven, with some early readers never continuing to read much after that and some late readers becoming voracious at the task. And six years of elementary-school arithmetic was learned by a dozen nine- to twelve-year-olds in twenty contact hours over twenty weeks.
The significance of the fish metaphor is that it represents the peace and quiet of getting completely away from the stresses of modern life, but, more specifically, it represents freedom from one major source of stress in young children’s lives: the coercion of compulsory, government-run education. It also represents a reprieve from the nagging coercions of adults, whether they be parents or teachers.
The guiding premise of both schools, best stated by Greenberg when asked by a new student for advice about going to college, is: “You can do anything you want to do.” You can, in other words, play cards all day, cook all day, take walks, read books, ask staff for a lesson—or fish. The causes of so-called problem children vary, but many are just plain bored of sitting at a desk in a classroom and are sick of having adults lord their size and power over them.
The choice of “doing nothing,” which is “nothing” only in the eyes of adults who think young people should be sitting in traditional classrooms, enables children to relax and become more at peace with themselves and others. When they are ready, they can, if they so desire, choose to pursue other forms of learning and eventually think about what they want to do the rest of their lives. One boy at Sudbury Valley who fished nearly every day for several years became interested in computers at age fifteen. At seventeen he and two friends founded a computer sales and service company; he then went on to college and a career in computers. One boy at Summerhill who had never attended classes taught himself in his last year at the school to pass the university exams.
Equal dignity, or equal respect between adult and child, is what both Sudbury Valley and Summerhill offer their students. That is probably the appeal and success of the democratic meetings for which they are well known. Every member of the staff has only one vote, while the students run the meetings. Empowerment is not too strong a word to describe the effect this has on the students at all age levels. Self-directed, self-responsible young adults are what both schools produce.
Know any children who cannot sit still in a traditional classroom or who are always getting into trouble by being disruptive? My answer to those in charge is that for some of these children the answer may be: let them go fish.
